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They drove in silence until Clay commented, 'I haven't seen you in the OR for a while.'

'Well...
I
work
part time,' she explained, 'which perhaps is why you don't always see me. I work Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, sometimes in the chest surgery service and sometimes in the general surgery service.'

'Mmm,' he said, 'those are my operating days.'

'I know...'

He chose to ignore a certain inflection in her voice, which could mean any one of several things. 'Do you work part time because there isn't enough work?' he ventured. 'I know there have been lay-offs, but I thought there was a demand for nurses trained in OR work.'

'I choose to work part time,' she said. 'I have a daughter, six years old. My mother looks after her when I'm working, but she can't take her five days a week. Besides, I wouldn't want to be away from her that long. There's not much point in having children if you're not going to spend time with them.'

'I see,' Clay said, realizing in that moment that he had been—was—inordinately attracted to Sophie Dunhill, considering that he scarcely knew her as a person, as a woman—she had merely been the embodiment of a function, an efficient cog in the machinery of his professional life. The attraction was odd, too, because she wasn't really his type—too quiet or something, he thought. Also odd was that he felt chagrined that she wasn't free. 'I didn't know you were married.'

'I'm not...not any more,' she said quietly. 'I'm a widow.'

Clay glanced at her quickly, at her impassive profile which conveyed to him a tension beneath an outward calm. He felt shocked. 'You're too young to be a widow,' he remarked, saying what he was thinking.

'Something like that can happen at any age,' she said quietly as she looked steadily ahead. 'Anyway, Dr Sotheby, why should you know anything about me? We don't exactly move in the same circles, apart from working together occasionally. Even that isn't very congenial, is it?' She gave a wry laugh.

'I wish you'd forget about that,' he said.

'I've tried. But it's just one among other such incidents for nurses in the operating rooms...and sometimes it's just one too many, the proverbial straw that breaks the camel's back, although I don't mean to go on about it so much. When you need the job as much as I do, you feel pretty helpless to do much about such things. Usually I can stand up for myself quite adequately, but on that day my daughter was sick so my mind wasn't as much on the job as it should have been, so I felt pretty bad about it.'

'I understand,' he said gently. 'I wish I'd known that.'

'Have you children?'

'No. I'm not married. Never been married.' There was a silence that spoke volumes, namely that he couldn't really know what it was like to be sick with anxiety about a child. But he did know—not first hand, definitely, but he had seen and treated enough children with serious and life-threatening diseases and accidents that he understood the anguish of parents. Many sleep
less nights had been spent
with the few children he
treated, fuelled
by his empathy and compassion. Most of the time he worked with adults, whom he went back to with relief.

'I guess I shouldn't have come to work on that day,' she said, 'but I'd already taken two work days off.'

'Forget about it, Sophie,' he said.

'It's all in the line of duty, I tell myself,' she said, with a self-deprecating laugh. 'I guess I'm overly sensitive.'

For once, Clay had no idea what to say. In a few moments a rather strained silence was broken by her need to give him directions when they got to the area known as Linden Park.

They drew up in front of a row of small, old, modest houses of red brick, each one a little different from the next, each with a certain charm. It was a quiet residential street, with mature trees and small, verdant front gardens.

'Which one is yours?' Clay asked.

'Number two,' she said. 'Thank you very much, Dr Sotheby, I do appreciate it. I expect I'd still be waiting for the street-car if you hadn't come along.'

'My pleasure,' he said. 'Try not to be too hard on me, Sophie. I promise to be the model of decorum when next we meet in the OR.'

When the lights came on inside the car as she opened the door, he could see that her eyes were a hazel colour, expressive, serious. When she smiled briefly, he could see the strain on her face, the tiredness.

With a flash of insight, he added, 'Did you ask not to work with me? Is that why I haven't seen you for a while?'

'Yes,' she said, her voice very soft. With that, she pulled the door closed again, putting them into comparative darkness, illuminated by streetlamps shining through trees.

Clay leaned his head back against the head-rest and closed his eyes with a sigh. 'This is an odd sort of situation to be in,' he said. The tension between them was such that you could have cut it with the proverbial knife. He wasn't quite sure why the hell he should care so much, why he didn't just get out, open the car door for her, escort her to her front door and wish her goodnight. It would be an old-fashioned gesture, but one just as necessary on modern streets; in this case it would bring an awkward pause to an end.

'Please, don't think I'm some sort of fragile bird or something,' she said very quietly. 'I'm pretty good, usually, at looking after myself. I just wanted a break from your surgical service.'

'What happened to your husband?' he found himself saying, when he'd really intended just to say goodnight.

With her hand on the door again, she hesitated. 'He had lymphoma,' she said. 'He was very ill for about a year.'

After a moment, Clay said, 'That must have been pretty awful to deal with.' On these occasions he resisted reiterating the common expression 'I'm sorry', as though the speaker were personably responsible in some small way for what had happened. It seemed even more inappropriate when you hadn't known the person. As a simple expression of regret it was all right, but it didn't mean much. Yet he felt for her, so much so that he desperately wanted to pick up one of her hands which she held clasped in her lap to enfold it in both of his.

'It was,' Sophie said.
'Especially for him.
I
don't
want to feel sorry for
myself. It happened four and a half years ago. I have my daughter...she fills my life. She's the best thing that ever happened to me. When she's sick, I sometimes find myself overreacting, frightened that something might happen to her in the way it happened to Peter, my husband. I try not to let her see my anxiety...'

'I can understand that,' he murmured gently.

'It's such a pleasure now to have an ordinary life. I embrace that ordinariness with open arms...to go to work in the mornings to a job that I like, for the most part, to come home to my daughter, my mother, my dad, who live nearby,' she said with quiet passion. 'All those ordinary things that we usually take for granted seem so extraordinary now, so wonderful.' Where she had been quiet before, Sophie now seemed to want to talk, and Clay relaxed back in his seat, looking at her profile as she stared straight ahead.

'Mmm.' He nodded.

'When something like that happens to you, instead of looking at it from the other side of the fence all the time, you realize how thin the line is between being well and not being well,' she said thoughtfully. 'Having experienced it, it gives you that extra insight that's so necessary in our job. Some people seem to have that anyway—I admire them so much. On the other hand, some other people seem incapable of empathy...'

'Yes,' he said, feeling that word to be inadequate when he wanted to tell her what a great nurse she was, that he enjoyed working with her, that he respected her professional expertise. Somehow the words wouldn't come, and he was normally so glib with women, even though he did say it himself. Maybe it had something to do with the more you cared, the less able you were to express it in words...something like that.

Sophie put her hand on the car door again. 'Well,' she said, 'goodnight, and thank you again, Dr Sotheby.'

'My pleasure,' he said. 'Wait!' As though moved by an instinct that was quite beyond his control, he shifted sideways and kissed Sophie on the cheek. 'Goodnight.'

The
thunk
of the closing car door punctuated the quiet of the summer night. Clay watched her open the gate of her tiny front garden and start up the path before he switched on the engine and guided the car away from the kerb.

Sophie watched the sleek, dark blue Buick saloon drive slowly away from her down the street. The feel of Clay's kiss was still, tinglingly, on her cheek, a patch of heightened sensitivity. To say that he had surprised her would have been a massive understatement; it had taken all her self-control not to gasp in amazement. Instinctively she had wanted to turn her face towards him so that he could kiss her on the mouth...but really she didn't like him, didn't like him much at all.

He was one of those super-competent men who unwittingly intimidated lesser mortals. Not that she thought of herself as a lesser mortal—it was just that she wanted a normal, well-paced life, not a life that was perpetually in the fast lane, with no time to get off. That was how she saw Clay Sotheby, who went perfectly with the befurred and bejewelled, sophisticated Dawn Renton who was his lover, so she'd heard.

And she hadn't particularly wanted her colleague to see the modest house that she lived in, that she loved, so his insistence on driving her had engendered an annoyance that still rankled. It wasn't that she was ashamed, exactly, of its simplicity—it was more that it
was her private
sanctuary, something that she wanted
to keep
removed from her work life, except for two or three close friends.

Sophie's heart was beating uncomfortably fast. Her own moment of vulnerability was disturbing, because now she couldn't count on herself to remain detached from him. Already she was very aware of him at work as a very attractive man, someone who wouldn't, most likely, be available to her. Men like him were trouble, not least because they had a way of going full tilt for what they wanted, trampling on anyone in their path.

Although she didn't assume that he had any motives of a personal nature where she was concerned, she sensed that she could be susceptible, eventually, to the powerful magnetism he exuded without even trying. When he'd tried—overdoing it a bit—as he had when they'd been dancing, she'd found her sense of the ridiculous taking over, which possibly had been what he'd intended.

Men like that, with healthy egos, who thought every woman whom they happened to turn their eyes on went weak at the knees under the onslaught, left her irritated. Sometimes she thought of such an over-inflated ego as floating over the guy's head like a huge red balloon, in which she longed to stick a pin so that it would deflate with a rude hiss and gurgle, rather in the way that Mandy, her daughter, would blow up a balloon and then let it go.

Dr Clay Sotheby, she thought as she stood by her front door, savouring the pleasant June night, was much too attractive for his own good. With charm to go with it, he didn't really have to lift a finger, to make any sort of effort it seemed to her, to draw women...perhaps the wrong women sometimes. There were predatory women, as there were predatory men, she mused. She knew her own sex only too well, having worked with all types in the large, multi-disciplinary teams that were prevalent in hospitals.

That could mean that women were so dazzled by Clay Sotheby's exterior that they didn't really get to know the person behind the facade. There was a sense in her that he was a very complex person, and she herself liked to see behind the facade, if possible, before falling for anything exterior. Often that was difficult.

He was tall, with a sensual way of moving, which she was sure was unconscious and uncontrived, so that he drew female eyes wherever he went in the hospital. Darkly handsome, blue-eyed, smoothly sophisticated, he seemed to be one of those men who were universally appealing to women.

Sometimes he played up to it, she'd observed since she'd been working with him. It was done in a subtle, self-mocking way.

He wasn't a conceited man, she considered, but he still had a big ego. Maybe he wouldn't be able to do the job he did, when he had to make decisions quickly in the heat of the moment—the
right
decisions—if he didn't have a very healthy self-confidence.

The grapevine had it that he was too dedicated to his job, too ambitious, to be interested in marriage right now, but that he had plenty of women in tow. Many medical men of his age had been divorced once, or even twice, and had sired several children. Although she wasn't interested in gossip, it wasn't possible to tune out all the information and rumour that floated around a hospital. In Clay Sotheby's case, rumour said that he was having an affair, long-standing, with Dr Jerry Claibourne's secretary, the glamorous and somewhat snooty Dawn Renton.

When the car disappeared round a corner, Sophie turned to unlock the door. Well, here was one woman who wouldn't be falling at the feet of Clay Sotheby, even if the chance presented itself. Although she was sometimes lonely, she'd had her fill of relationships for now. Yet dancing with him had disturbed her in a way that she didn't care to examine too closely, followed by that unexpected kiss on the cheek. It made her realize how much she missed male affection and attention.

Thoughtfully she acknowledged that having been married to Peter, coping with his illness, had numbed her in a way that usually acted like an emotional anaesthetic when she was with men, so that she couldn't respond. Everything had been for Peter—all they had done had been for his illness, for his comfort. Somewhere along the line she had lost herself. Now she lived for the daughter she adored.

Closing the door quietly behind her so that she wouldn't wake Mandy and her own mother, who was staying the night, she crept upstairs to check on them, which she did from long habit.

As she lay in bed later, she thought of Clay's sarcastic words to her that time in the operating room: 'We all feel like falling asleep, Nurse, but, please, don't do it until we've finished the operation.' Those words had humiliated her, even though she'd fully understood the stress of his job. Probably he'd forgotten her name, as doctors didn't often call nurses 'Nurse' any more. She remembered how, from sheer exhaustion, her eyes had pricked with tears.